Subject
A major member of a two-part sentence, designating the performer of the action or bearer of the attribute or state contained in the othermajor member, the predicate (for example: deti igraiut,“the children play”; trava zelenaia,“the grass is green”; dom postroen,“the house isbuilt”). In most languages, the subject is expressed by the nominative case of nouns, substantive pronouns (“I,” “he,” “someone”), and numerals(“two,” “five”). The subject may also be a substantivized adjective (bol’noi popravliaetsia,“the sick man is getting well”), participle(opozdavshie izvinilis’,“the latecomers apologized”), infinitive (chitat—ego strast’,“to read is his passion”), idiomatic word combinations(khodit kto ugodno,“anyone at all walks around”), word combinations of the type otets s synom (“father with son”), and coordinative andasyndetic sequences (voshli otets i syn,“father and son entered”; gibli molodost’, sily, zdorov’e,“youth, strength, health perished”). As a grammatical category, the subject is to be distinguished from what is called the logical or semantic subject, which may be expressedalso in an oblique case (for example, ei plokho,“she feels bad”; u nas radost’,“we have joy”; byt’ groze,“a storm is brewing”). In theKartvelian-Caucasian languages and certain others, the subject is expressed by the ergative case. I. N. KRUCHININA ---------------------------------------- In the representational arts, an event or situation depicted in a work and often designated in the work’s title. Unlike the theme of a work, thesubject is a specific, detailed, graphic, and narrative disclosure of the work’s idea. Historical and genre works of art have particularlycomplex subjects. ---------------------------------------- (in Russian, sub”ekt), In linguistics, a term combining the concepts of a grammatical, logical (communicative or psychological), andsemantic subject, in ideal cases expressed by the grammatical subject (podlezhashchee) of a sentence. For example, in the Russiansentence Petr vesel (“Peter is happy”), Petr combines the features of the grammatical, logical, and semantic subjects. The concept of thesubject is divided into categories because the grammatical, logical, and semantic organization of a sentence may not coincide. The grammatical, or formal, subject is the subject (podlezhashchee) of a sentence. The logical subject, or theme, corresponds to the pointof departure, the basis of the communication, and the information being imparted. Representatives of the psychological school have calledthe logical subject the psychological subject, meaning the idea present in the speaker’s mind from the beginning. Some linguists distinguishbetween the communicative and the logical subject. The semantic subject refers to the word designating the possessor of a given quality orthe agent of action. In the sentence Veselo Petru (“Peter is happy”), the answer to the question Komu veselo? (“Who is happy?”), veselo isthe logical subject and Petru the semantic subject; the grammatical subject is lacking. REFERENCES Paul, H. Printsipy istorii iazyka. Moscow, 1960. (Translated from German.) Panfilov, V. Z. Grammatika i logika. Moscow-Leningrad, 1963. Kolshanskii, G. V. Logika istruktura iazyka. Moscow, 1965. Mathesius, V. “O tak nazyvaemom aktual’nom chlenenii predlozheniia.” In Prazhskii lingvisticheskii kruzhok. Moscow, 1967. (Translatedfrom Czech.) Alisova, T. B. Ocherki sintaksisa ital’ianskogo iazyka. Moscow, 1971. Zolotova, G. A. Ocherk funktsional’nogo sintaksisa russkogo iazyka. Moscow, 1973. N. D. ARUTIUNOVA ---------------------------------------- the agent—be it an individual or a social group—of an effected action and of cognition; the source of an activity directed toward an object. Inphilosophy, the term “subject” has had various meanings. For example, Aristotle used the term to designate individual being as well asmatter, or formless substance; for medieval scholasticism, subjects were something real and inherent in things, while objects existed only inthe mind. The modern interpretation of subject begins with R. Descartes, whose sharp juxtaposition of subject and object was the starting point of theanalysis of cognition and, in particular, served as a basis for establishing the reliability of knowledge; with the subject seen as the movingprinciple in the cognitive process, the way was opened for studying the conditions and forms of this process and its subjective premises. I.Kant took the next important step along this path. He revealed some fundamental laws that govern the subject’s internal organization andmake it possible to attain universal and necessary knowledge—for example, the doctrine of categories as forms regulating thought; theprinciple of categorical synthesis; and the concept of the subject as something generic, embracing the entire historical experience ofcognition. G. Hegel worked out an idealistic interpretation of the social and historical nature of the thinking subject. For Hegel, cognition was asuprapersonal process based on the identity of subject, understood as absolute spirit, and object. The pre-Marxist materialists, whoseinterpretation was a psychologistic one, regarded the subject as an isolated individual whose cognitive faculties are biologically rooted andwho only passively reflects external reality. Dialectical materialism has radically expanded the concept of the subject by linking it directly to the category of practice. In their view thesubject is the agent of an effected action and not merely of cognition. Thus the subject’s social and historical nature is newly clarified:according to Marxism, an individual is a self-conscious subject to the extent that he has gained some degree of mastery over human culture—as represented, for example, by the tools of object-oriented activity, forms of language, logical categories, aesthetic norms, and moralvalues. The subject’s activity is the determining condition that transforms one or another fragment of objective reality into a given object,depending on the subject’s particular form of activity. The assumption here is that the subject, rather than being an entity complete in itself,is an agent that continuously and creatively transforms the environment. The materialist interpretation, having demonstrated the creativenature of the subject, made it possible for Marxism to reveal what is the true subject of history—namely, the popular masses, who are thechief force in the creative and revolutionary transformation of culture and of society as a whole. REFERENCES Marx, K. “Tezisy o Feierbakhe.” In K. Marx and F. Engels, Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 3. Lenin, V. I. Filosofskie tetradi. Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 29. Lektorskii, V. A. Problema sub”ektn i ob”ekta v klassicheskoi i sovremennoi burzhuaznoi filosofü. Moscow, 1965. Kopnin, P. V. Gnoseologicheskie i logicheskie osnovy nauki. Moscow, 1974. V. A. LEKTORSKII Category:Philosophy